Shouldn't Have Gotten Involved
by Sarah1281
Summary: As Elva slowly succombs to the plague, she remembers just how the Alienage had come to this point. It had all started a year before with two reckless fools who hadn't known how to keep their head down. She had known that it would eventually come to this.


Shouldn't Have Gotten Involved

Disclaimer: I do not own Dragon Age.

Note: Since Elva's such a minor character, I should probably clarify that she's the one in-game who tattles on the CE if they don't come forward, who belittles them on their wedding day, and who advocates doing nothing about the kidnapping.

The world was on fire. Elva wished she could say that she was surprised. She knew this would happen. She had known this would happen from the moment those trouble-makers had gone off to storm the Arl's estate. She had known that the best case scenario would be them never finding a way in or being killed by guards before getting anyway near Vaughan. It wouldn't do those poor girls any good but it would keep the rest of them safe.

She had tried to remind them why they never did anything about the shems taking liberties with them before. She had tried to make them see that for as bad as everything was now, it could always be infinitely worse and a full-on assault on the estate would only make everything worse. Her words seemed to at least touch most of the people but that redheaded Soris and that other one just _had_ to go in and reclaim their brides. Their eyes flashed defiance as they demanded to know whether Elva suggested that they just abandon their brides to be raped and possibly killed. They had shaken their heads in disgust and left when she had replied in the affirmative. They thought she didn't care. They were wrong.

There had been six girls kidnapped. Even if they were broken into so many pieces so as to never recover or outright killed it was still only six girls. The Alienage had nearly fifteen hundred. The missing girls made up less than a half of a percentage of the population. If these reckless fools caused trouble, they wouldn't be the only ones to suffer from it. At least when Adaia had raised hell she had been careful to make it clear that it was she alone who was responsible and so she died alone. If these children got themselves caught and killed then the entire Alienage would pay. The shems couldn't afford to let them start to get strange ideas in their heads like they had any power or could do anything about whatever the humans wanted to do to them.

The wedding party had soon returned minus only one or two of their members. Most of the women appeared to be fine but that sister of Soris', Shianni, had clearly already been brutalized. No one else seemed to realize it but Elva had lived long enough, _seen_ more than enough, to recognize the signs. Shianni would be fine, though. She wasn't the type to break easily but, unfortunately, also the type to cause enough trouble that a shem somewhere would take pleasure in breaking her down and killing her by inches. She just couldn't keep her head down.

The trouble-makers had avoided their punishment at the hands of the guards. One of them had gone off to go join the mythical Grey Wardens – nope, not at all putting on airs – and the other hadn't even spoken up and admitted what he did. The Maker, like everybody, hated elves, though, and so all the Grey Wardens died at Ostagar and Soris was quickly ostracized. Ostagar had brought other things, of course. There were refugees who had come pouring in with their desperation and the plague. Arl Urien had fallen at Ostagar and Soris had helped kill his heir so who would step up but an Arl from the north? This Arl Howe hadn't been pleased to hear what had happened to Vaughan and so had decided to remind them all of their place.

He had brought the fire. There had been riots after Vaughan's death and Howe had mercilessly put them down. His men had killed whoever so much as looked at them funny. There didn't seem to be a reason to slaughter the entire orphanage. The shems had just wanted to prove a point. _They could do whatever they wanted to_. Soris and his cousin should have just kept their heads down. **They** had caused all of this and Elva wasn't alone in thinking that. Life became almost intolerable for young Soris and if he hadn't brought it all on himself, Elva might have even felt sorry for him.

The first thing that Elva could remember her mother ever telling her was that the shems had all the power and that defying them would mean death. Keeping her head down was the only way to stay alive. Her father hadn't kept his head down and his head had been mounted on a pike outside of the Arl's estate. Elva never had found out the details of what had happened but the fact that she didn't know how far one could go before getting that kind of treatment had always driven her to stay on the safer side. The fact that her father died had meant that there was very little money to spare and so Elva really should have been grateful that she got a husband at all but the one she did get…he was so wretched, really. Ugly and fat and lazy and drunk and useless. She might have been better off on her own. At least he knew better than to get involved in what was going on (if he were even sober enough to notice) and so he and the children had stayed alive during the riots and the purge and the blood that was splattered everywhere.

Even if bodies were burning in the street, it didn't matter. The ever-present fire that started mere hours after Howe had arrived in Denerim was lessening lately. It would appear that someone had noticed their plight and decided to make some use of it. Tevinter 'healers' had come. Shianni was accusing them of taking the people who went in for quarantine as so few of them ever made it out. Despite the fact that the Tevinters claimed that the quarantined people were still ill and that's why they hadn't left, Elva knew better than to trust a shem. Slavery wasn't legal in Ferelden but it was legal in Tevinter and for all she knew that was what was happening to everyone that disappeared. Or maybe she was just getting old and paranoid. It didn't matter. She'd be safer out here either way.

Elva had been lucky in that her house hadn't been one of the looted ones during the riots. There had been nothing to take, of course, as her husband was too fat and drunk to work and her money was stretched far too thin as it was. Still, even if she had nothing it was nice to have one of the few houses without broken in doors or windows. She had been coughing for weeks. Her temperature was far too high to be normal and yet she found she couldn't get warm. There was a basin next to her bed to make sure when she vomited it didn't go all over the place and sometimes there was blood in it. It was getting so hard to think straight. She knew what this was. She knew what was happening.

This was the end. This was _her_ end. It hurt. It didn't seem fair, really. She had never been one of the troublemakers. She had always kept her head down and had done nothing to deserve this and yet she was dying anyway.

It wasn't _fair_.

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